Welcome to Part 3 of our Website Traffic Blueprint article series, where we show you how to automate traffic to your site using the WordPress CMS.
In Part 1 of this series, we provided an overview of the process, and explained why using an expertly configured WordPress website or blog is the key to automating traffic to your site …
(With an expertly configured WordPress blog, all you have to do is publish great content consistently to begin bringing more traffic!)
In Part Two, we focused on the setup phase of this process. We explained the best way to get started if you don’t have a web presence yet, how to set everything up if you already have a site, and what to do if your existing site was built with WordPress.
(In Part 2 we show you where to set up a WordPress website or blog on your domain)
In this section of the series, we look at the configuration phase of the WordPress traffic automation system. We explain how a WordPress site should be configured to bring new visitors automatically when you begin to publish new content to your web site.
WordPress Web Traffic Automation Blueprint – Configuration
Finding ways to drive more traffic to one’s website is often cited by many website owners as their greatest challenge online. Businesses are becoming increasingly more competitive and are looking for any and every advantage they believe will increase their competitiveness online.
Having the ability to generate traffic on demand can be a huge advantage over other competitors. With an expertly configured website, your business has a flying start and an immediate competitive advantage online.
Configuration Is The Difference
There is a significant difference between an expertly configured WordPress site and a website that has been professionally installed and set up by an expert website builder but not necessarily configured to its fullest advantage.
Here is a simple way to understand the difference:
An expertly configured WordPress site gives you a professional web presence with online business marketing automation!
(An expertly configured site gives you a web presence and a built-in automated online business marketing process!)
Not only does a whole lot more work go into building and integrating an automated online business marketing system into your website, but also a special kind of expert knowledge.
Let’s illustrate this with a story.
Knowing Where To Tap
Things were going well in the gizmo assembly plant when all machinery suddenly stopped.
As no one could figure out what happened, the floor manager decided to call in an expert.
Promptly after arriving, the expert headed immediately towards the control box. After staring at the schematics for less than 3 minutes or so, the expert then produced a teensy-weensy little hammer from his utility belt and made a gentle tap about three and half cm from the left corner of the box.
Immediately, everything began working once again.
The manager was greatly relieved as he thanked the expert, who left just as quickly as he had arrived.
A couple of days after resolving the incident, the factory manager received an invoice for $5,000.
The manager called the expert, demanding to know why they had been charged such a ludicrous fee for so little time spent delivering such a minimal amount of work and promptly requested an itemized invoice before hanging up.
The next day, an invoice notice arrived and was placed on the manager’s desk. Upon opening it, this is what he saw:
The #1 challenge most businesses face online is being able to consistently drive traffic to their sites.
In the story we’ve just described, how much money did the gizmo plant stand to lose when the equipment ground to a halt and no one on the business was able to fix it? Did the expert in our story not have the right to demand fair compensation for years spent acquiring the knowledge, skills and expertise that allowed him to quickly fix a potentially costly problem?
Similarly, if you could have a WordPress blog set up and configured so all you ever had to do is publish content to it and Google, Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, YouTube and dozens of other traffic-generating online properties would be immediately notified, how much time and money would you save?
(How much better would your business be if you could automate the process of attracting new visitors to your site?)
Although the solution to many challenges is often quite easy once implemented, it rarely turns out to be that way.
Knowing how to expertly configure a WordPress site is more than just installing a website and configuring a few basic settings. It also involves knowing where to tap! This includes knowing things like:
- Which plugins need to be installed to add certain functionalities to your site.
- Which third-party accounts need to be set up to achieve specific results
- Which options you need to configure to make sure things will work as you have imagined, etc.
(Driving traffic automatically with WordPress is a process that requires expertise)
This part of the WordPress traffic automation system is not so technically difficult, but it’s quite complicated. This is because it’s not as simple as installing a piece of software, clicking on a button or two … it’s all of this and much more.
Expertly configuring your website involves the integration of various different components including your web hosting server, your website or blog, and a number of third-party sites …
(The configuration phase involves more than just configuring some WordPress settings)
If we try to flowchart the activities involved in the configuration process, it would look something like this …
(A simplified flowchart of the steps involved in the configuration process)
Let’s examine these steps in more detail.
Your Server
We’re not talking here about the process of configuring your webhosting account for site installation purposes. What we are talking about, is tweaking settings in your web hosting account specifically for handling web traffic …
(During the configuration stage, your web server settings need to be checked for handling both good and bad traffic)
Not all traffic is welcome traffic. Some of the traffic your site will attract will be unwelcome traffic like bot spam, security threats, brute-force bot attacks, etc.
This aspect of the configuration process, therefore, is all about evaluating your needs, planning for good and unwanted traffic and then adjusting settings in your server accordingly. This can include things like configuring spam protection and securing server files, to configuring domain and email redirections, setting up htaccess and 404 redirections, etc …
(Have you configured your control panel settings for handling things like emails, page error redirects, etc?)
After your web server settings have been checked and configured, the next step of the configuration phase is to set up various external sites and services.
External Services
The concept behind setting up external sites is that all of your content should be posted to one central location (your WordPress site) and from there, syndicate automatically to other parts of your traffic generation system, or notify traffic-related web properties and applications.
After adding these external platforms to your system, content pointing back to your site gets automatically added to your search, social and aggregator accounts. Your content and business will be given exposure to new audiences and new sources of traffic.
Some of the external sites and services will need to be set up before configuring your site to speed up the process and some will need to be done later, during the automation phase.
For example, here are just some of the accounts you will need to have set up:
Google Webmasters
(Google Webmaster Tools)
Google Webmaster Tools lets you inform Google about your site’s pages, submit XML sitemaps for automatic page indexing, and provides you with a range of useful information, SEO tools and diagnostic reports about your website.
Once your account with Google Search Console have been set up, use the details with web traffic-related settings and notifications in WordPress and other applications.
Google Analytics
(Google Analytics)
Google Analytics lets you improve your website’s results, SEO, marketing campaigns, and more, by tracking all user behaviour, pages visited, keywords searched for, social media referrers, etc.
Once your Google Analytics account has been set up, traffic monitoring code can be added to all pages in WordPress via a simple Google Analytics plugin used with other applications and reporting tools.
Bing Data And Tools
(Bing Webmaster Tools)
Bing Webmaster Tools is similar to Google Search Console. After setting up your account and entering site details with Bing, use this information with web traffic settings and notifications in WordPress (e.g. using plugins like Yoast SEO) and other applications.
WordPress.com
(WordPress.com)
As explained in Part Two, WordPress offers website owners the option of a hosted vs self-hosted website. We recommended choosing the self-hosted WordPress version if you are planning to grow a professional online presence for your business.
WordPress.com (the hosted option), however, provides some great tools, which can be accessed by various WordPress plugins. We recommend setting up an account with WordPress.com, therefore, and we’ll explain how to integrate these features into your automated traffic generation system in the next installment of this article series.
Social Media And Social Bookmarking Sites
(Syndicate your content automatically to your social media and social bookmarking accounts and get new traffic to your site)
You will need your various social media accounts set up before you can configure these as part of your traffic generation system.
After setting up and configuring everything, you will be able to syndicate your content automatically to your social media and social bookmarking accounts and drive new traffic to your site.
Make sure you have pages set up with all of the big social networks – Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Pinterest, YouTube, etc.
There are many social bookmarking sites you can syndicate your content to. You don’t need to create accounts with all of them, just choose the ones that will work with your system and/or content sharing tools.
(You can syndicate your content to lots of social bookmarking sites. Image source ShareThis.com)
Additional Sites, Aggregators, Etc.
There are a number of new online platforms and content aggregators that can serve as secondary-level traffic generation sources. Some are free or provide free accounts, and some offer a range of pricing plans to suit different users.
For example, here is a content aggregator that lets you add your WordPress site feed …
RebelMouse
(RebelMouse)
RebelMouse is an aggregator for your social profiles and RSS feeds. Your content displays in a Pinterest-like format and users can follow your RebelMouse social feed.
There are many different sites and platforms that can be incorporated into your own web traffic blueprint. Please contact us if you would like to explore this area further and discuss a strategy to suit your needs.
Once you have configured your server settings and set up third-party site accounts, it’s time to configure your site.
WordPress – Configuring Your Site
The first step in configuring your WordPress site for traffic is to ensure that its global settings have been correctly set up.
Let’s go over some of the important areas.
WordPress – Global Settings
The WordPress dashboard area contains a Settings section that allows you to modify your site’s main settings …
(WordPress admin menu – Settings)
General Settings
Content entered into fields like Site Title and Tagline can influence your site’s SEO, search indexing, etc …
(Settings Menu – General Settings)
Writing Settings
The Writing Settings area contains one of the most powerful and frequently overlooked traffic notification systems available to WordPress users …
(WordPress Settings – Writing Settings)
As stated in this section,
When you publish a new post, WordPress automatically notifies the following site update services …
Unless you have intentionally chosen to prevent search engines from indexing your site – see next section, then your site will automatically notify the list of services entered into the Update Services text box
By default, when WordPress is installed, only one service is listed …
(Update Services)
You can notify dozens of update services automatically – just add a list of update services to this section and WordPress takes care of the rest …
(WordPress lets you notify dozens of update services automatically!)
Download A Comprehensive List Of Ping Services For Your WordPress Site!
Click the link below to download a comprehensive list of reliable and authoritative ping services for your WordPress site or blog:
Download A List Of Ping Services For Your WordPress Site
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Note: If you need help setting up the list of ping services on your site, we recommend using a professional web services provider. You can find professional WordPress service providers in our WordPress Services Directory.
Reading
This section affects how visitors will see your content when they visit your home page and blog pages.
The syndication settings in this section can have an influence web traffic. For example, choosing to display the full text vs a summary of your post, affects how your content displays to users in RSS feeds and blog post digests, and could affect someone’s decision to explore your content further, and whether or not they will visit your website or blog to view the rest of the content from excerpts, or read the content in full without the need to click through to your site.
The most important setting in this section as far as your traffic system is concerned is whether the Search Engine Visibility check box is enabled or not.
Generally, you would want search engines to visit your site. Leaving this box unchecked enables WordPress to instantly notify the update services list whenever a new post gets published (see Writing Settings above). Unless there is a specific reason to discourage search engines from visiting your site, leave this box unchecked …
(Global Settings – Reading Settings)
Discussion
Although this section is mostly concerned with how users engage with content on your site, you have the option to allow notifications to blogs linked to from your articles, and to allow link notifications from other blogs (pingbacks and trackbacks). This can work for you, but it can also drive bad traffic in the form of SPAM comments …
(Global Settings – Discussion Settings Screen)
Permalink Settings
Permalinks allow your site to publish posts with SEO-friendly URLs …
(Settings Menu – Permalinks)
The examples below show some of the options for configuring your permalinks …
(Configuring permalinks)
We have created a detailed tutorial about using permalinks here: How To Improve Your WordPress SEO Using SEO-Friendly URLs
Plugin Settings
The WordPress developer community makes available thousands of plugins that can add almost every type of functionality imaginable to your website, including many plugins that improve traffic generation.
Here are some types of plugin categories that affect traffic and plugin examples
Blog Defender WordPress Security Plugin
Once again, it’s important to configure your site for dealing with the effects of both good traffic and bad traffic. No blog is guaranteed immunity from being attacked by hackers.
(Security Plugins stop bad traffic from harming your web presence)
Security plugins like Blog Defender help to make your WordPress blog invisible to hackers and bots.
More information:
SEO Plugins – Yoast SEO
SEO plugins help drive more traffic by making your website more search engine friendly …
(SEO plugins like Yoast SEO help drive more traffic by improving your site’s SEO)
A plugin like Yoast SEO can significantly improve your SEO. Properly configured, this plugin not only makes your website easier for search engines like Google and Bing to index, it allows you to specify how your content will show up in Google’s search results and social media pages, e.g. Twitter, Facebook, and Google+.
WordPress Social Sharing Plugins
Allowing visitors to easily share your content online can help drive significant traffic to your site, especially if you provide great content that adds real value to readers.
(You can add social sharing buttons to your site easily with free or inexpensive WordPress plugins)
WordPress users can easily add social sharing buttons to their website with WordPress plugins.
Many social sharing plugins let you choose which social sites your content can be shared to, embed social buttons into your content, set up custom update notifications, display/hide share counters (e.g. number of likes), etc. Some social sharing plugins even allow you to protect content or downloads which users can unlock by liking your page.
Theme Settings
As well as configuring various plugins, many WordPress themes also include features that can help you drive more traffic to your site.
For example, as well as options and settings for configuring the layout and design of your site, some themes also provide options for improving search optimization and site linking structure for faster indexing, add tracking, social sharing buttons, etc …
(Many themes can be configured for improved traffic results)
With many quality themes, adding social sharing buttons and features to your site is as easy as clicking a button …
(Many WordPress themes include built-in social sharing features that can be easily enabled on with the click of a button)
Configuring Additional WordPress Features
Last but not least in the WordPress traffic configuration process, are the things that need to be set up outside of the global settings.
This includes the following:
Website Legal Pages
Once again, when preparing your site for a growth in visitor numbers, it’s important to plan not only for both bad and good traffic but also for all the situations that can damage your business when more and more people start finding and visiting your website.
If you make money online (or plan to), you need to make sure that your site complies with regulatory agencies.
(Is Your Website Or Blog Legally Compliant?)
If you need help adding compliance pages to WordPress, see this article:
Categories & Post Tags
Post categories and post tags help search engines better classify and index your web pages, which helps you get more traffic.
(WordPress categories help improve traffic by improving your site’s search engine optimization.)
As we strongly recommend in this article, your site’s post tags and post categories should be discussed and set up earlier on, during the Website Planning Stages.
When considering ways to automate and improve traffic, you will want to review and make sure that the post tags and categories you have set up.
Add A WordPress Site Map
A visitor site map that lists all of your posts and pages is not only a useful navigation tool for users, it can also help external sites discover more of your online content …
(A site map is not just great for visitors, but for web traffic too!)
An HTML site map and an XML sitemap are not the same things. An HTML site map is a web page that links to all other content on your site, whereas an XML sitemap contains code that only search engine bots can understand. Although search engines like Google will index your pages just from an XML sitemap (which plugins like Yoast SEO can provide – see earlier section), making it easier for visitors to find more pages on your site can result in increased traffic.
404 Error Page – Don’t Forget This!
When online users enter the wrong URL or click on an invalid link, they will typically be greeted with an error – page not found message …
(A WordPress 404 Not Found page)
Configuring your 404 page allows you to recover traffic that may otherwise be lost. …
(Configuring your 404 page allows you to recover web traffic that may otherwise be lost.)
Although a 404 Not Found error page can be set up on your web server, there are several WordPress plugins that let you easily configure your 404 page from your WordPress admin area.
WordPress Traffic Automation Blueprint: Configuration Phase – Summary
Once you have your website fully set up and expertly configured, all you then have to do is publish great content on a consistent basis to automatically drive web traffic.
The process of expertly configuring your WordPress site, however, can be quite involved and elaborate and requires the configuration and integration of different components and web properties …
(WP Traffic Blueprint – Configuration Checklist)
The expertise involved in expertly configuring a WordPress site typically takes many web professionals months to learn.
Once you have configured your WordPress site, the next step is to automate the process. This step is addressed in the next section of our WordPress Traffic Automation System series.
This is the end of Section Three
To read the rest of this article, click on the link below:
This tutorial is part of a comprehensive series of tutorials designed to help site owners learn how to grow their business online inexpensively and drive traffic organically using a WordPress website or blog and proven web marketing strategies.
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"Wow! I never knew there's so much to learn about WordPress! I bought one of the WordPress for Dummies three years ago, such authors need to be on this course!" - Rich Law, Create A Blog Now
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